A big quake, an App and an excursion

We were asleep on the evening of 7th October when the jolts woke us up. Slowly at first then intense shaking followed by a long tail of decreasing intensity the whole event lasted about 2 mins with a couple of small aftershocks in the following hours. We didn't know whether to get under the bed, run outside or stay put so we stayed put and waited for the house to collapse. It didn't - which is reassuring because the quake was a big one by local standards and no-one at work can remember a bigger one. It was Mag 6.6 and 20 km from our house but 100 km deep. I didn't realise we had a tectonic plate boundary running up through our valley. There was a smaller (4.7) quake in the valley on the 15th that Jenny felt but I didn't. We also had a small tremor last night which doesn't seem to have been registered by any of the Geology Services.

We had bottles and jars in the pantry fall to the ground and our fridge and stove have both moved. I've decided not to store my camera on the shelf in the linen cupboard in case it falls. No damage at work and nothing of note in town apparently. The swimming pool here has been closed because the drainage system was damaged and is not working. When it rains the pool fills past the overflow point. No-one can say when it will be fixed. Jenny is sad that she can't have her regular swim after work.

At work I'm preparing a presentation covering all aspects of scientific writing. When finished I'll split it up over maybe three sessions but it is nearly ready to test on a couple of friendly colleagues. I'm using one of my own papers as the example for the various sections and realise how I could have written it so much better - more focussed, clearer and shorter. So I'm using it as an example of what to do and what not to do. As I've been working through this I've had to cover things like shonky journals and conferences. I am constantly bombarded by email invitations to publish in predatory journals and attend dodgy conferences.

Something I will have to address but have been putting off is the use of AI in scientific writing. There are many ways it can help - particularly with scientists who don't have English as their first language. There are also many ways it can trip you up however and I need to ensure NARI scientists use it for good and not evil. It is quite astonishing to feed a research paper into ChatGPT and have it generate a summary that is 90% of what you would want for a paper Abstract. The trick then is to recognise and remove anything it has wrong and to identify the 10% it has missed.

I am a published App developer!  After several years of learning to code and several months of coding followed by several months of working through Apple's bureaucracy my first app hit the Apple App Store last week. It is a conversion of the Hamilton Field Naturalists Club Hamilton Nature Guide book. With no promotion yet it has been downloaded 25 times (including two downloads from China!). If you have an iPhone do yourself a favour and grab a copy by searching for "Hamilton Nature Guide" on the App Store. It's free and runs on recent iPhones, iPad and Macs. We want to get an Android version out but this might take some time. ChatGPT could actually be very useful with this as well.

We have had a visit from a couple of CSIRO soil scientists this week. They have been doing a soil survey of our valley. Because of the topography and large river systems the soils can change dramatically over short distances with implications for the crops you can grow. The plan is for soil maps of the whole valley that farmers can access from their local district agriculture office. Decisions on which crops to grow on what soils should be easier as a result. The CSIRO chaps and a few others from ACIAR, Grow PNG etc were going on a road trip up the valley and Jenny and I were invited along. We applied for permission, charged up our satellite phone and off we went. So good to be out of the office for a day. We met corporate rice producers and smallholder farmers growing cocoa and balsa trees. Interesting to hear from a couple of them that the climate has changed and become less predictable. We've heard the same things in Tanzania.

Lots of grassy mountain slopes along the way indicating the slash-and-burn agriculture that has been used here for probably thousands of years. It turns rainforest into grassland - probably permanently.

I managed to add a few birds to my trip list - mostly things along the highway. Papuan Harrier was a new species for me. Also seen were Varied Honeyeater, Blue-tailed Bee-eater, Singing Bush Lark, Pied Bush Chat and White-bellied Cuckooshrike. I'm still trying to get out into the forest with two of the tour companies operating here. It's all so hard for some reason.

I managed to photograph the Chestnut-breasted Mannikins that visit our compound regularly and I took a nice photo of the Torresian Imperial Pigeons (TIP) that roost in the palms at work. The books say that the pigeons should have yellow bills but mine have mostly bluish bills. Young birds are supposed to have "bill straw-yellow with purple-grey base" which doesn't reallyy match what I'm seeing.  Looking at eBird photos for Morobe and adjacent Madang all TIPs seem to have blueish bills. Photos from southern coastal PNG show birds with yellow bills. I think I've discovered a new species!

Counting down the days until our trip to Walindi Resort on New Britain...